No More Times – Paris Music Hack Day

On April 20-22 2013 I attended Music Hack Day Paris at Deezer HQ to represent OpenEMI. I’ve attended most Europe-based Music Hack Days since 2011, and whilst there’s usually a recurring hack theme / meme, Paris really took the cake.

Two days prior, Daft Punk’s Get Lucky ft Pharrell Williams exploded onto the internet. My social & news feeds were awash. There was no escaping Bangalter & de Homem-Christo. MHD Paris was no different – upon our arrival at Deezer HQ we were greeted by a motivational mural above the front door, quoting Daft Punk’s Harder Better Faster Stronger. The event’s playlist opened with Get Lucky, followed by One More Time & further tracks from DP’s catalogue. I opened my presentation with the familiar image of Batman slapping Robin, this time for attempting to “introduce” him to Get Lucky… It was inevitable that many hacks were going to be similarly themed.

Deezer Paris HQ atrium

WE KNOW!

Please god, no more times…

Shortly in to hack time, I began to record the number of times we heard the omnipresent track. Between the continuously looping playlist (30 hrs straight, 0 hrs sleep) & overhearing other hacks utilising the track, I tallied 23x by Sunday afternoon. Therefore I decided to create a “remix” of the track called No More Times.

To do so is incredibly easy. The EchoNest Remix API allows any tracks analysed by the EchoNest to be remixed, edited, & recombined programmatically. It’s available for Python & Javascript, with the documentation & full working examples on GitHub. With only an hour until demo time, I was able to submit Get Lucky for analysis (surprisingly nobody had done this previously), obtain track IDs, & create the new track using some very simple javascript.

You can listen to the result here. It combines the 1st, 3rd & 4th beats of every bar of Get Lucky with the 2nd beat of each bar from One More Time. It sounds… interesting. Further experimentation with the API is required to make something actually palatable for the ear.

As predicted, the majority of hacks were indeed Daft Punk themed or used Daft Punk data or tracks for their demo. My primary hack (built with Ashling Horgan) was a Daft Punk themed iPad boardgame. Personal fave hacks were a cute l’il recommendation service which (regardless of seed artist or track) only recommended Daft Punk, and Wallify (multi-mobile-device lyric vid display) which used Get Lucky. Check out a demo of Wallify below.